Around Town

Just a few snapshots I've accumulated on the 'ol camera phone. The sun is setting later; the trees are budding; Spring is trying to spring.

An Accidental Possibles Bag

How we managed to accumulate so many reusable shopping bags I'm not sure, but currently I've got quite the heap of them. As an experiment, I thought I would try re-using one of the bags as a source of fabric for a sewing project. I grabbed a Walmart bag, cut it apart and went to work.

Ultimately, the project was a bust. But, as I was cleaning up, I found myself looking at a scrap of fabric. It seemed just the right dimensions to turn into a big 'ol pocket. I added a belt loop, sewed it together, and voila! I had a crude possibles bag:

The dimensions are roughly 5" wide, 9" deep. My first thought was that it would be an ideal trail snack bag. As far as I'm concerned, you can never have quick enough access to M&M's. I didn't really think this through, so the bag had no way to close it. Given how deep it is, however, I'm not convinced this matters.

After experimenting with uses for the bag, I decided to make a version with a closure. Velcro would have been the obvious choice. However, I'm not a huge fan of how loud Velcro can be, and besides, I didn't have any on hand. What I did have was a bunch of magnets. So today, I made version 2.0 of my Possibles Bag, with magnets sewed in place to keep the bag closed.

The magnets seem to be doing the job well, though time will tell if they're clever or annoying.

As for using reusable bags as a source for fabric, this is already known to work. My little project only further adds to the evidence. The Walmart bag material is incredibly lightweight and seems durable (the no-closure bag weighs less than ½ an ounce!). The original bag was heat sealed, rather than sewn. So perhaps sewing this fabric was a bad idea, but still, it seems to be holding. I've got some really heavy duty Trader Joe's bags that I think I may experiment with in the future.

Here's one more action shot of the project:

Review: To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines

In To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son and the Kindness of Machines Judith Newman manages to take an incredibly difficult topic and turn it into an entertaining, can't-put-down book.

I recall vaguely having heard a segment on NPR or the like about a mom heaping praise on Siri. The idea was that her autistic child could engage with Siri in a way that was both novel and educational. Siri had unlimited patience to talk about any topic, and has a primitive set of manners that helped her son gently learn hard to grasp social lessons. When I saw To Siri with Love on the bookshelf at the library I thought it must be the same story teller, so I picked up the book.

I'm certainly glad I did.

The vast majority of the book has nothing to do with Siri or any other tech. It's a mother's story of her raising twin boys, one of which is autistic. The whole emotional spectrum is here: from joy and boundless pride, to fear and absolute frustration. For those of us peeking in on this world from the outside, I'm thankful that Newman took the time to show us the full range. As I was reading the book, I found myself at times cringing internally, knowing that Newman would almost certainly take flak for being so open. What Mom wants to admit that her son has limitations, much less limitations that make him less able to function in society.

Mostly, I'm thankful to Newman for helping further fill in a picture of what it must be like to live with or even be, autistic. If we didn't understand what it meant to be blind, we'd consider those without sight clumsy, lazy, disinterested in learning and perhaps just dumb. But once we understand they simply can't see the obstacles in front of them, our perspective vastly shifts and we find that blind people are capable of everything a seeing individual is. Newman describes a sort of social and emotional blindness in her son that leaves us quick to judge him as things he isn't. Yet, once we understand his limitations how he's different, we can see he's so much more than we imagined.

Of course, I recognize how important it is to take this as a sample size of 1, with a condition that is still far from well understood. So yeah, don't read the book and think: "OK, now I get autism." But still, getting a view into Newman's son's life, with all his struggles and successes is invaluable. And there's plenty of humor and wit to keep the book moving.

Update: As is my habit, after posting this I went over to Amazon to peek at the reviews. I like to hold off on reading reviews until after I've posted my own comments so I'm not too skewed by anything I read there.

At first I saw that the book had 99 reviews and was rated 4 1/2 stars. Huh, I thought, people liked this book. And then I started reading. Ouch.

As I suspected, many were not amused with Newman's book and leveled quite a few charges at her. Some I agree with, some I don't. Here are some of the biggies.

She massively and hurtfully violated the privacy of her child, which is inexcusable. I appreciate this charge, but ultimately don't think it's a deal breaker. Yes, she's putting her entire family on display, but I think there's a purpose there that may allow the ends to justify the means. I think it's noteworthy that she doesn't just expose her autistic son's life, opting to share dirt on everyone. With that said, I'd be downright mortified if my Mom published a tell all of my birth to Bar Mitzvah.

Her consideration of sterilizing her son falls somewhere between troubling and demonic. This I agree with. I suppose I can appreciate her sharing her deepest thoughts, even if they seem wrong headed. Ultimately, it's the book itself and her own words that seem to show just how wrong it is to make this medical decision for her child. She herself says that 'delays' are just that, 'delays.' So deciding that your child should go the rest of his life without the option of having children just seems wrong.

She doesn't love her son. She wishes her son wasn't autistic. She likes her neurotypical son better. I'm not buying these arguments. Yes, she's open about the challenges of raising her child. And what parent wouldn't want their child to have an easier life? If my Mom could have waved a magic wand and made me less socially awkward, a better reader and not have dyslexia, she would have done so. But just like my Mom accepted and loved me, for me, so do I get the sense does Newman and her child.

I appreciate the individuals who took time to write extensive reviews on the book. A number of the reviews are written by folks who identify as autistic. I can only imagine what it must be like to have a book that seems written about you, but gets it so wrong.

So here's the thing: read the book, then go read the reviews, then go continue to be open minded and learn more.

Hiking Maryland Heights: The Overdue Sequel

Nearly 12 years ago we hiked Loudoun Heights, which is located near Harpers Ferry. Only recently did I discover that across the river was an equally impressive and similarly named hike: Maryland Heights. It took us over a decade, but this past weekend, we finally knocked out this companion hike.

Maryland Heights promised views and civil war remnants, and delivered on both of these. We started the hike in Harpers Ferry, which meant we got to walk across the very cool foot bridge, and then made our way down the C&O canal a bit to the trail entrance. From there it was a slog up hill, but one totally worth it. We stopped at various annotated sites to try to imagine the troop activities and infrastructure that was in place during the Civil War.

Every time I felt a bit winded, I imagined the herculean effort it would take to drag the massive guns and ammunition into position. Consider the 9,700lb(!!) Dahlgren gun that was positioned on the top ridge of the mountain. Each round it fired weighed nearly 100lbs and had a range of 2 miles. That's a lot of schlepping.

The stone fort and surrounding walls are in pretty good shape considering they're left to the mercy of the elements and hikers. The view from the cliffs, however, has to be the true highlight. It's like you've been scaled down to HO size and been dropped into a picturesque train model. The view into Harpers Ferry from the cliffs is just too perfect.

We finished up our hike at around 3pm and the crowds still seemed to only be growing. I can't imagine how overrun this hike is on a warm Spring day. It's no surprise this is a popular destination, so keep that in mind when scheduling this hike.

We finished up our hike in Harpers Ferry and spent some time trying to soak in the local history, of which there is an obscene amount to digest. I'm sure I was taught the details of John Brown's Raid at Harpers Ferry, but re-reading them, I'm left with only more questions. Was his violence based campaign just? Was he a hero or a terrorist? Was his action a spark that led to a greater good? Was it OK for figures like Emerson and Thoreau to gloss over Brown's violence and portray him as a martyr?

So many questions and so few answers. I think a quote from this article, penned a few days after John Brown's raid, bears repeating:

Never before was such an uproar raised by twenty men as by Old Brown and his confederates in this deplorable affair.

There will be enough to heap excoriation on-the memory of these mistaken men. We leave this work to the fit hands and tongues of those who regard the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence as "glittering generalities."

Believing that the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice, we deeply regret this outbreak; but remembering that, if their fault was grievous, grievously have they answered it, we will not, by one reproachful word, disturb the bloody shroud wherein John Brown and his compatriots are sleeping. They dared and died for what they felt to be the right, though in a manner which seems to us fatally wrong. Let their epitaphs remain unwritten until the not distant day. When no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello or by the graves of Mount Vernon.

History, views and a delightful day in the woods. What more could you ask for?!

Android Enterprise Device Management for the tiny, broke and geeky enterprise

I'm tackling the next challenge in my makePad experiment: working with multiple devices. The devices were easy enough to come by. I simply ordered 3 more BLU Advance 4.0 phones from Amazon. What I'm not looking forward to is configuring three new devices by hand.

And let's say I do manage to put up with the hassle of manually installing and customizing each phone. What happens when I want to make a change and experiment with a new configuration? I've now got to repeat the process again. No thank you.

A little research told me that what I wanted was an Enterprise Device Management Solution. That way, I could manage the phones in a bulk fashion. But even the name sounds complex and expensive. And researching a few platforms bore this out. I needed something simpler, but yet still effective at working with multiple devices.

As I poked around the web, I rediscovered something: the Android developer tool adb has capability to install and uninstall apps from the command line. Not only that, but you can query the packages installed on a phone and even download the APKs for apps installed on the phone. All without root access.

This was encouraging: what I lacked in enterprise funding and staff I could make up for in dev skills. Using this knowledge about adb, I went ahead and built andappsnap, a tool for pushing and pulling snapshots of apps to and from Android devices. Here's how it works.

Step 1. Plug in the master phone, that is, the one with the apps you want to deploy to the rest of the devices.

Step 2. Run andappsnap:

 andappsnap -c pull -d makepad-20180301

This command will pull all the 3rd party apps off of the master device and store them in a directory named makepad-20180301. In this directory is a file named apps.index which lists all of the apps that were captured.

Step 3. Unplug the master phone and plug in device to be configured.

Step 4. Run andappsnap:

 andappsnap -c push -d makepad-20180301

Every app listed in apps.index will be installed on the device.

Step 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all the devices have all the apps installed on them.

I also implemented andappsnap -c nuke which removes all third party apps on a phone. Yes, this command is dangerous. It will gladly remove every app on your 'master' phone without hesitation. But heck, the whole process is dangerous. So yeah, be careful.

andappsnap is little more than a basic shell wrapper around adb and the Android command pm. pm is an especially frustrating command to use because it lists a number of interesting operations it claims to do. Though without having root access, these operations fail. So I was truly surprised that my push and pull process worked so smoothly. The fact that I can keep around a snapshot of makepad apps and easily deploy different configurations is a surprising bonus.

Automatically installing apps on the device is a great first step in configuring my makepads in bulk. However, it's just that, a first step. There are other device setup tasks I'd like to tackle, such as configuring the launcher and disabling apps like YouTube and Chrome. Though for now, I plan to celebrate my victory over the manual app installation process and tackle those concerns later.

Just Try It! Adventures in Bushcrafting very close to home

Lately, I've been acutely aware that when it comes to learning a new skill or selecting a piece of gear, there are four levels of awareness: Hearing It, Seeing It, Trying It and Doing It.

Consider this example: you want to buy a new flashlight for backpacking, specifically for night hiking. You need a number of competing benefits: the light should be bright, compact, have long running time and be affordable. How do you arrive at the ideal flashlight?

Hearing It. You could just head over to reddit.com/r/Ultralight and ask for a recommendation. The problem: what might be bright enough for person may not be bright enough for you. And, it's possible that the person who's make a recommendation has never used the flashlight on a night hike.

Seen It. Thanks you YouTube, we live in the golden age of seen it. With luck, you'll be able to take the recommendations you've received and watch detailed reviews on YouTube. It's not quite as nice as holding the flashlight in your hand, but it's far better than just hearing about the light.

Tried It. At this point, you've picked up that flashlight and now it's time try it out. Sure, a walk through the neighborhood at night isn't the same as a tramp through the woods, but it's still educational. You'll know at this point if the flashlight really is bright enough, light enough and long running enough.

Did It. Finally, it's time to actually use that flashlight in the woods.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how invaluable that Try It step is. Sure, the Doing It step is great, but by the time you're there, you almost certainly don't want to fail. But in the Try It step, the cost of failure is minimal.

This means that more than ever, I'm looking for ways to try stuff. Which is how I found myself sitting outside on our deck whittling a pair of chopsticks.

The other day, I realized that I'd never bother fashioning a pair of chopsticks in the field. Rather than put this on my next campout's TODO list, I though I'd follow my own advice and give it a try. So while running along Four Mile Run trail I kept an eye out for sticks that seemed appropriate for fashioning chopsticks from. I picked up two candidates:

I grabbed a chopstick from our utensil drawer and used it to get an idea of length and thickness that I was shooting for. And then I whittled away.

After about 10 minutes, I had two very crudely fashioned eating instruments:

By my own Try It measure I still wasn't finished. Next, I needed to cook and eat lunch with them. So I did. I cooked up some rice noodles and broth and enjoyed slurping up lunch outside:

So what did I learn from all of this?

Field expedient chopsticks are totally usable. They take about 10 minutes to make, and will leave the hand gripping the stick totally fatigued. Most importantly, I need to keep an eye out for truly straight sticks to start with. The wonky pair I made works, but require more care to eat with.

On my next camping trip, can I leave the spork at home and rely on improvised chopsticks? Maybe. I've got at least one experience under my belt that says, go for it!

Fun with Fire: a Bic powered hot knife

From this video on alternative ways to light a bic lighter (useful for when you're hands are numb), I found myself on this lighter hacks video. One of the suggested hacks involved carefully attaching a paper clip to a lighter to create an improvised soldering iron.

I was curious if this hack truly worked, so I busted out a Bic, a paper clip and some Gorilla tape. I haphazardly folded the paper clip into position and taped it in place:

I fired up the Bic for 20 seconds or so and then attached a plastic yogurt container:

Like a hot knife through butter, the metal tip trivially pierced the plastic. Looking around for what else I could play with, I sliced up a ziplock bag.

I then went and grabbed some solder and tried melting it. No luck. Perhaps I need lower temperature solder for this to work?

This trick does get the paper clip hot enough to melt hot-glue-gun-glue. I grabbed some items recycling bin and confirmed that you can improvise a glue gun if need be:

How practical is all of this? Not sure yet, but being able to rig up a hot knife in a few seconds with minimal supplies shows promise to me.

The video opens with a slick hack for keeping a lighter burning continuously. It involves a using a large screw, a nut and a hot glue gun to attach everything. This works, though a simple hair band works equally as well:

But I think calling that a hack is probably being a bit too generous.

Dragiano v1.0 - Click your way to music creation

While on a run last Friday, I had an idea for interactive music generation tool. I imagined an extremely stripped down sequencer where you could draw arbitrary lines. As the sequencing head encountered the lines, a musical tone would be played. The vertical position of the line would determine the pitch of the tone. It was sort of sequencer meets violent-thermin.

Much like the thermin I intended to build this on a HTML5 canvas object.

It was only today when I went to implement this concept that I realized that a native HTML5 canvas object wasn't going to do the trick. A canvas would let me draw the shapes I needed, but lacked the ability to add and remove shapes (like the play head and sound-lines), as well as detect mouse clicks on the shapes.

Fortunately, these limitations are addressed in the very slick concrete.js library. This lightweight library makes use of multiple canvas objects to implement object layering and editability. It even uses a clever color hack to allow for hit detection.

With this library in hand, I was able to bring Dragiano to life. Here's how it works:

Click anywhere to set your first point. Now click again. The the line you just created represents a tone to play. Now hit the play button. The play head should eventually hit your line, and if all goes well, you'll hear sweet, sweet music.

Seriously, try it:

I was pleased to see that all of this works without modification on my Android device, too.

So far, I haven't been able to coax anything but screechy noise out of Dragiano. But for now, I'm just satisfied that he's functional.

Feel free to grab and play with the source code here.

7 Sounds - They're not music, but they're all mine

I've spent the last few weeks dabbling with my audio framework and it's definitely been educational. I'm not a lot closer to producing music, though I have been having fun making quirky sounds. Take this one:

A couple of times I tried to make tunes from my guesses what notes would power them. That was pretty much a disaster. Ultimately, I partially copied note-for-note this version of Super Mario Brother's Theme from Band.js and was delighted when it played correctly. This shows me that it's not my framework's fault that I can't put two notes together; it's clearly my lack of musical knowledge.

After having dabled with my own audio framework, the code for band.js is even more impressive. It's remarkable how similar our code is, even though I had different goals in mind. I guess there's only so many ways you can make an Oscillator Node generate a C note.

Here's a handful more tunes that I've authored. Like my visual poems they don't stand on their own. But they do have a similar quality of being built by experimentation, and most importantly being called a success if they come across as interesting.

It comes down to this: I may be just mashing keys on the piano, but at least I'm having fun. Grab the source code for all of this here, and go make something awesome!